Stephen Graham Jones

The Babysitter Lives -

Probably the best 'new' horror writer going these days - though he's not new because he's been clicking away for quite sometime until someone in the publishing world took notice beyond journals and specialty publishing houses.

In this weird and bloody tale, a babysitter goes to the wrong house, one where there's been a brutal set of murders in years past. She has the sense that something is off, and the sense is confirmed when one of the kids takes her through a show more portal/wormhole/door in the house that leads her to another spot in the house. The babysitter loses time when she makes the trip and then realizes that she is sometimes in a parallel location where the killer has been hiding and waiting for someone to venture there as a way to escape.

While SGJ pays tribute to [The Haunting of HIlle House] and [Hellhouse] and [The Shining] in the acknowledgements, I felt the distinct presence of Philip K. Dick in the narrative, as well. SGJ's work, in general, is unfused with that weirdness that only PKD can bring to a story.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended show less

Ten years ago, four Blackfeet men killed a number of elk in a place where they were not supposed to be hunting, including a young doe carrying an out-of-season calf who just did not seem inclined to die. Now, ten years later, the spirit of that elk is back, and she's out for revenge.

I have interestingly mixed feelings about this one. I do like the way Stephen Graham Jones writes, but I'm less sure how I feel about his pacing. I like the way this novel captures the tension in its protagonists show more between wanting to cling to and uphold their traditional ways and finding the memory of those traditions and the sense of their value slipping away. But, although I can intellectually appreciate the ways in which it plays into those themes, something in my brain just had trouble ever quite taking the elk spirit as seriously as I should have. "They're prey animals," my mind kept whispering. "If they were ever capable of seeking revenge, we'd never see the end of them!" Which I suspect is probably just me being entirely too white to have the right cultural resonances, and not the book's fault at all. But it probably did play into me never quite finding it as creepy or shocking or unsettling as horror ideally is for me, even when it was doing creepy, shocking, or unsettling things. I do, however, rather appreciate the way the spirit doesn't so much harm its victims directly as induce them to turn on themselves and each other, which gives the horror an additional psychological dimension.

But while ultimately it's not quite as scary and satisfying as I'd hoped for, for reasons that may not be its fault, I still found it worth reading, and it's definitely left me still interested in reading more of Jones' stuff. (This is the first novel of his that I've read, but I have read and been impressed by some of his shorter work.) show less

Not so much a horror story as a sad, almost tragic, story about a kid with hopes and dreams to turn out to be just dreams. He's just a kid who ends up being a serial killer who doesn't want to kill and who mourns what he did, and the hurt he caused his loved ones. It actually hurts to read at times because Tolly isn't evil. I loved it.

Creepy, wildly gory, atmospheric, and with a stack of framing devices hardly seen since Wuthering Heights. A tale of the horrors of experiencing the colonization of the Americas as an indigenous person, stacked inside a story of vampires, revenge, and religious horror, stacked inside a kind of horror version of A.S. Byatt's Possession. The very ending section kind of took me out of everything a bit—the tone got a little too wacky and ended up being way more funny than scary, for me (your show more mileage may vary—for a time my mother kept a prairie dog as a pet, which may be a factor). show less